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In Memoriam: Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

At the time of his death, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He had taught previously at the University of Virginia, Princeton University, and Wellesley College.

This appears to be the first memorial notice. I will post links to some others as they appear.

A good deal will no doubt be written about his contributions to philosophy in the coming weeks, months, and years. Let me note here that he was also a quite gifted undergraduate lecturer. I was fortunate to have him his last term teaching at Princeton, in the Spring of 1982. It was a course on "Kant to 1900," that covered Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James! The course had a distinct theme: bad and misguided reactions to Kant (Fichte and Hegel) and good, i.e., proto-pragmatist reactions to Kant (Marx, Nietzsche, and, of course, James). When Raymond Geuss joined the Princeton faculty a year later, he had that course stricken from the books, on the grounds (I still recall him saying this) that "such a course can not be taught." There was some truth to that, though, in fact, Rorty taught it engagingly and well, but it was crucial that he had a story to tell and a moral to convey. Even though I have come to think Rorty's view of Nietzsche, among others, was quite wrong-headed, there is no doubt it was one of the most valuable undergraduate courses I had precisely because of its ambitious scope, Rorty's synoptic and pedagogical skill, and the distinctiveness of his take on what was important in each of these authors.

UPDATE: The philosopher Farhang Erfani at American University has put together an informative set of links about Rorty and his work.

UPDATE (JUNE 11): The Stanford press release is here. (On the blackboard in the photo [from 2005] appears to be the title of my edited collection The Future for Philosophy which I know Rorty had been lecturing about around that time.)

ANOTHER: The New York Times obituary is here. It contains fewer howlers than is the norm when it comes to journalistic writing about philosophers. The big exception is the quote from Russell Berman, Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford, who says that Rorty "rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints" and returned it "to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community." This is silly and ignorant on many levels. First, there is no evidence that Rorty had any such effect on philosophy (perhaps Rawls had such an effect, but certainly not Rorty), and his own writings about political questions always struck me as fairly conventional and uninteresting. Second, philosophy has had as its "core concerns" going back to the PreSocratics precisely the questions about knowledge and reality which Rorty argued we ought to abandon: it was precisely Rorty's project to turn philosophy away from what had been its "core concerns" for millenia.

May I suggest that those who want to understand why philosophers often found Rorty a bit puzzling ought to read the old essay by Jaegwon Kim, "Rorty on the possibility of Philosophy," available on JSTOR, and which originally appeared in Journal of Philosophy in 1980. Professor Kim gives the best short overview of the main themes of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and indicates some of the central ways in which Rorty's critique might not seem compelling to philosophers.

ONE MORE: Several readers sent along Habermas's memorial notice for Rorty. In my opinion, it overstates his philosophical originality. Rorty's great skill was always a synoptic one--thus, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he brought together critical themes from Sellars and Quine, among others, and suggested a new way of understanding their import. I think it very unlikely that any knowledgeable historians of philosophy in our period will recall Rorty's work, as Habermas does, as "a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments."